Tag: parents

I’ve been drinking a quart of green smoothies daily for about a year now, with a few exceptions. When I fail to drink them for a few days (too busy, need to go to the store, etc.), I find that the first sip of the next smoothie is so welcome, so delicious, so satisfying.

My children drink them because I put them in front of them. I gave them a pint at first, then my 11 y.o. son struggled to get them down. I let him drink half a pint for a while, until he got used to them. Finally, he asked if he still had to drink the small glass (half a pint), or if he could have a full glass now–YES! He also enjoys drinking them in front of friends and telling what’s in it. That took a couple of weeks, probably.

Now, they drink a pint, and sometimes whatever else is left over after I have mine. They like lots of strawberries in theirs, and fresh peaches, when they’re in season. I have converted several friends to drinking green smoothies, too. (Them: “What is that you’re drinking?” Me: “A green smoothie.” Them: “What’s in it?” Me: “Want a taste?” or “Would you like the recipe?”)

–Janelle B.

I purchased my Blendtec Total Blender at Costco during a demo at the store. The demo guy recommended I go online to GreenSmoothieGirl.com for great recipes and support. Since I have been drinking the green smoothie, my bowels are more regular than they have ever been. I was diagnosed with Irritable Bowel Syndrome and now I do not have constipation. It is the most wonderful feeling to be regular! Also, since adding the dark leafy green vegetables, I have been able to avoid colds from grandkids and friends. I can honestly say I am much healthier. I never miss a day and it has been about 4 months. Thank You, Robyn.

Thank you for all the emails, and I’m so sorry I haven’t had time to respond to them all. I have returned rather somberly from my cousin’s funeral in Northern VA, where I grew up. She got the stomach flu and we don’t know why she died. We are all devastated by the loss of this young mother of three young sons (plus another one who died), and watching them sobbing right before her casket was closed is very possibly the most tragic and devastating thing I have ever seen in my life. Little boys’ hearts breaking and nothing we could do about it.

Shawnie comes from a wonderful family, and her parents were my “other parents” growing up. It was a sweet experience to celebrate the life of Shawnie Romney Tull and I am privileged that I knew her.

So I have been more reflective than ever on the power of a young mother, because very frankly that was a more tragic funeral than even the funerals of small children I have attended. Because a young mother is SO DESPERATELY NEEDED. Mothers change the world. They control more than they realize.

It’s a conversation I have with my business partner over and over . . . we discuss the needs of everyone who reads GreenSmoothieGirl.com. And we try to figure ways that everyone is included, because of course I care very much about the health of everyone–the single people, the teenagers, the elderly–I get emails from all these demographics and more.

But as I try to decide where to spend my time in content development, though, my soft spot is always for the moms. I very much want to support them. If you are one, please take care of yourself first. Remember that on the plane, you can’t put the oxygen mask on your kids until you have your own on. Remember that you’re not helping anyone by neglecting your own mental, physical, emotional, and spiritual health. Remember that children learn more by example than anything else.

If you have young mothers in your life, not just this Sunday but today, too, give them a hug and tell them that the work they do is important. That its rewards aren’t always obvious, but they are in fact extraordinary. Give them some extra love. A friend said to me yesterday, “Everyone should go to a funeral every six months. That’s how you remember what’s important, and what kind of person you want to be.”

After a year of thinking and searching deeply about going vegetarian, I took the leap in September of ’08. What made the transition easy was the discovery of the green smoothie!I first heard of them on Robyn’s informative website, greensmoothiegirl.com.I was intrigued and investigated the origins of green smoothies and started to find whole blogging communities who were drinking these liquid vegetable treats. I viewed many of the YouTube videos Robyn had posted and saw how simple it was to get my veggies the green smoothie way.I started right away, using my simple kitchen blender.My 11 y.o. son and my husband were curious and started drinking them with me almost immediately.We LOVE them!

The chronic eczema around edges of my scalp are clearing up (some are completely gone!), ridges in my fingernails are flattening out and nails have become hard, chronic tiredness has been replaced with vibrant energy, mild arthritic symptoms in fingers vanished, hypothyroid symptoms growing less (although I’m on a low dose of Armour and have been for years, I still experience many of the hypothyroid symptoms – but they are really improving!), insomnia seems to be vanquished, I’ve lost 9 lbs so far, and I don’t know if this could be related but I no longer sunburn!

But what is truly amazing is that I’m growing in streaks of brown hair where it was solid silver before-fabulous!

We are experiencing great health benefits from these marvelous drinks and I think we may be addicted to the vibrancy and high energy kick we get from them.I’ll be getting results from a blood test next week and I can’t wait to see the numbers! I’ve turned several friends and family members into green smoothie drinkers and am actually pursuing a radio show where I will be able to discuss and share my progress with others.Thank you Robyn for GreenSmoothieGirl blogs!Your generosity in sharing your info with the world has inspired so many to move towards health!

–Cher

I love them, I love green smoothies anyway, and I love your recipes the best. It is so good to have mainly greens and a few fruits instead of the other way around as I was previously doing. I love them and my kids do also. They crave them as I do.

We love green smoothies at our house. I am a homeschooling mom of four children. Three of my children drink smoothies because they love them, and one child drinks her smoothies because it’s a good health choice. I try to vary the ingredients here and there so that they don’t get bored with them. We drink them first thing in the morning. I also have been known to feed them to neighbor children who then will ask to have more! Also, they are pretty tasty as popsicles: I am sure they lose some nutrition being frozen, but the kids love them!

-Melanie H.

My family and I have been drinking green smoothie for 8 months. It has been our addiction. If I miss a day, I feel it and crave it instead of cake. My kids who are 9 and 6 actually ask me for them, so they have some before school. I no longer have pre-hypertension and I have lost 25 lbs. My husband no longer has to take his cholesterol medication and has lost weight. My best friend now gives it to her whole family and staff everyday. And another friend who just completed chemo will be starting also. Thank you!

-Lisa James

I look forward every morning to drinking my green smoothie because I know that it is a delicious, healthy, and empowering way to start my day. I now have my husband converted and my college-age son who needs good nutrition because most of the other things he grabs during the day are fast, on-the-go type foods. I feel full of raw goodness and do not need to eat anything else for most of the morning.

-Ciel M.

Hi, I’m 17 and a raw vegan and green smoothies have changed my life! I always felt tired and cranky and always a little hungry but as soon as I added green smoothies, I felt AWESOME! They give me everything I need, I love my green smoothies!

Thanks again for signing up for my free newsletter. See, I was just like you might be. I found myself in a place I hated: sluggish, 15 pounds overweight, suffering with a variety of health problems . . . and I was only 25 years old!

But that’s a story you already know well, because millions of people can tell that story.

Where I’ve come since then is the tale you’ll find much more interesting, I think. Because it represents the way out of the nightmare for you, too. The mess that is the modern American lifestyle of overweight, energy drain, and failing health. There’s only one way out of that mess. It’s a straight path. And it’s the road less traveled.

I am teaching, on GreenSmoothieGirl.com, my recipe collections, my blog, my 12 Steps to Whole Foods course, and my new book The Green Smoothie Diet, and this newsletter what that path is.

I got to that straight and narrow path through a fairly zigzaggy way . . .

But first, the cataclysmic moment when I knew something had to change. I had a 15-month old baby who was desperately ill. He was just fine until I quit breastfeeding him at 7 months old. Then, on formula and then eventually cow’s milk, he was mucousy and coughing, constantly ill, sickly and miserable, up all night wheezing. This went on for many months.

The pediatrician gave Kincade lots of syrups and pills and inhaled drugs. He was always drugged up. The meds may or may not have sometimes slowed the symptoms (I never was really sure), but one thing was certain: my little boy wasn’t getting healthier. And the doc told me the steroids were “guaranteed” to stunt his growth.

After quite a few months of this, I realized one thing very clearly, even if a lot of other things were still fuzzy for me. And that things was, doctors were not going to solve my little son’s health problems. After this information settled in for a while, in a terrifying way, I made a second realization: I, and I alone–not doctors or anyone else–was responsible for finding the information that WOULD solve Kincade’s problems.

A series of coincidences (that I now believe were inspiration, not coincidences) led me to study nutrition. I learned that a diet rich in raw vegetables and fruits, with whole grains and legumes and nuts and seeds as complements, might help my son.

Little did I know that it would actually save the whole family–including children not yet born.

A radical shift took place, not over a year or over an extended period of time, but literally overnight.

We were done with steroids. Done with bronchodilators. Done with cough syrups. Done with late-night emergency room visits. Cold turkey, just like that, we were done with fatigue, and all-night coughing, and stressed-out-Mom tears, and “What do I do?” after-hours calls to the nurse, and counting breaths per minute, and rocking a baby who was turning blue.

All because I got him off dairy products and sugar and white flour . . . and onto green smoothies and whole foods.

What we undertook was a lifestyle of eating–in this order–greens, vegetables, fruits, legumes, whole grains, nuts, seeds, and unadulterated oils.

That sounds like drudgery, but more than 250 recipes and dozens of video demos in my course show you otherwise. You can eat like a king–food with vibrant, complex flavors and textures–enjoying life . . . while returning your body to a state of health!

I developed GreenSmoothieGirl.com to make your path less zigzaggy. Writing and developing recipes for 12 Steps to Whole Foodshttp://www.greensmoothiegirl.com/12-step-blog/12-step-program/was a labor of love to flatten that learning curve for you, so it doesn’t take you 15 years of trying hundreds of different things. You can do it a much more linear way!

So I celebrated handing my book off to the publisher last Monday by goofing off a lot, skiing a few days last week. Turns out that a quart of green smoothie is an AWESOME skiing lunch. My girlfriends (with their inferior lunch) were losing energy and wanting to go home while I was still ready to keep slogging through the Utah Sundance slush late in the afternoon. (That’s the downside of spring skiing, the upside being you can ditch your jacket and gloves and just ski in a tank top–how fun is that?)

A handful of that Nantucket Trail Mix from Costco and I was SET for the day! Here are more green smoothie testimonials from my research–remember that MORE ENERGY is the #1 health benefit of GS that my study found, which corroborates Victoria Boutenko’s study. You need any of that?

I wish I started drinking green smoothies earlier in life! I cannot believe how much energy I have just from this one simple dietary change! My digestion issues vanished in one week and my skin looks amazing. I feel really healthy and cannot say enough about how much more energy I have.

–Anon.

I crave green smoothies. They satisfy my hunger. I am a teacher; therefore, I am surrounded by germs and viruses. Since I have been on green smoothies for about six months, I have not been sick. I am convinced the phytonutrients in my breakfast and lunch smoothie are what has kept me in good health.

–Chris B.

I am so in love with green smoothies! I am a 31 yr. old mother of four children. I am very into fitness/weight lifting to build muscle in my body. I started green smoothies just after I had been referred to GreenSmoothieGirl.com by my zoning lady for chronic headaches and muscle tension in my neck that would not go away. Soon after I started drinking green smoothies daily, the headaches and muscle tension left! I have not had the problem since.

I drink green smoothies for breakfast along with a whey protein shake every morning, and also for my snacks during the day, I make a full pitcher of green smoothie every 2-3 days and keep it in my fridge when I need a snack. It is quick and easy and very healthy! It keeps me on track for my ideal weight goals! I have converted many friends and family to green smoothies! I recommend them to everyone I meet! When someone asks me what I am doing to look so good, I just give them my personal green smoothie recipe and some fitness tips!

I would like to thank Robyn for this AWESOME idea and for taking the steps to get the information on her website to help others who so desperately need a nutritious lifestyle!

–LaDawn Doxey ( Syracuse , UT )

Feel better, have decreased the amount of sugar in the diet due to the smoothies. Like the increase in green veggies. Hate the taste of wheatgrass. Like this manner of getting chlorophyll better.

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GreenSmoothieGirl and GSGLife founder, Robyn Openshaw’s passion for educating people about diet and nutrition arose from her own personal journey. 20 years ago, Robyn weighed over 200 pounds and had 21 chronic diseases.

Getting off the Standard American Diet proved a lifesaver. Robyn lost 70 pounds without dieting, by converting to a whole-foods, mostly plant-based diet. Twenty years later, she is a competitive athlete, free of all disease and symptoms, and at her ideal weight.